´´Never again." That´s what Western leaders pledged about the
Holocaust´s millions of innocents murdered, and on Thursday, the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Nazi death camps,
world leaders again echoed that sentiment.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder reflected on the duty to remain
vigilant and on the great evils of the Nazi era. "Remembering the era
of National Socialism and its crimes is a moral obligation ó we owe
that not only to the victims, the survivors and the relatives, but to
ourselves," he said.

At a ceremony held on the grounds at Auschwitz, European Union
Parliament President Josep Borrell said the Holocaust was "something
which should never happen again," while Jacques Chirac, the first
French leader to acknowledge his nation´s guilt in the Holocaust,
pledged that the EU would stand against anti-Semitism. Newly elected
Ukrainian President Viktor

Yuschchenko, whose father survived Auschwitz, said, "There will never
be a Jewish question in my country, I vow that." A Vatican emissary
read a statement from the pope, while Vice President Dick Cheney,
Britain´s Prince Edward and Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski,
among others, listened on.

The unanimity of sentiment among Western leaders is touching, but
it´s perhaps not as reassuring given some recent incidents. In the
United Kingdom, for example, the Muslim Council of Britain boycotted
the Auschwitz commemorations this week, purportedly on grounds of
inclusivity. Iqbal Sacranie, the group´s secretary-general, said
commemorating Auschwitz "excludes ongoing genocide and human rights
abuses around the world and in the occupied territories of
Palestine," and therefore deserves a boycott. Khalid Mahmood, a
Muslim member of parliament, criticized such thinking. "Anybody who
is interested in human rights should support this remembrance," he
said.

Meanwhile, sadly, polls and anecdotal evidence suggest that even in
the heart of Europe, people are forgetting about the Holocaust, or
worse. In a recent poll in Germany, 62 percent of 3,000 questioned
said they were "sick of all the harping on about German crimes
against the Jews." Things are only slightly better in the United
Kingdom, where a recent poll showed that a quarter of junior-high
school-aged children don´t know what Auschwitz was and only 17
percent knew that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

As one horrified British observer said of the German poll, "It raises
fears that the current generation are not ready to pass on the
history and lessons learned from those events to their children."

He´s right. If we cannot pass on the history and the lessons learned,
our pledges of "never again" will have been in vain. (Copyright 2005
News World Communications, Inc. 01/29/05)